tutorials

DragonFly BSD & LFE

DU Duncan McGreggor · July 8, 2015 · 1 min read

Yesterday there was a tweet playfully ribbing Golang. It referenced an old WhatsApp blog post which briefly went over the WhatsApp engineering team's use of tuned FreeBSD machines running Erlang ... machines that were capable of handling 2 million TCP connections on a single machine. As such, it seemed like a good time to talk about BSD and LFE :-)

DragonFly BSD and LFE are a great match. DragonFly's core focus is scalability, with features such as lightweight kernel threads, a lightweight ports/messaging system, and the HAMMER file system. Installation of Erlang, LFE, and related tools is a snap. By default, DragonFly comes with git and curl pre-installed, so this is all that's needed for a base Erlang system:

% su -
# pkg update
# pkg install -y erlang rebar rebar3

The latest DragonFly installs Erlang 17.5.

To support LFE and lfetool, a few more packages are needed:

# pkg install -y gmake base64 bash
# rehash

With this done, you just need to do the usual to get LFE:

# cd /usr/local
# git clone https://github.com/rvirding/lfe
# cd lfe
# gmake && gmake install

And the dev-v1 version of lfetool now supports installation on *BSD machines:

# curl -L -o ./lfetool https://raw.github.com/lfe/lfetool/dev-v1/lfetool
# bash ./lfetool install &&  rm lfetool
# rehash

With that, you can exit as root

# exit
logout
oubiwann@mndvmb01% lfe

and run LFE as a normal user:

# exit
oubiwann@mndvmb01% lfe
Erlang/OTP 17 [erts-6.4.1] [source] [64-bit] ,,,

> (* 2 (lists:foldl (lambda (n acc) (+ n acc)) 0 (lists:seq 1 6)))
42

And that's all there is to it!